> the IT department gave the other team full access to my production machine
Your error is here.It's not your production machine. It's the company's production machine. Always expect the company to do whatever it wants with its machine, and use the machine accordingly.
That someone would let an agent run on it at any time, read what's there, and possibly modify the code or interrupt a process, without even informing me, is what I find problematic, to say the least.
The employer can't enter your machine to look at your personal info just because they feel like it, but they can access it for work related reasons to access work related info, if they have just cause.
Claiming the employer in the EU has no right to access your machine is plain false. It's the company's machine, on the company's network, inside the company's premises, it can definitely access it for a business use case. Now if you happen to put your private info there because you're sloppy, then it's on you. How hard is it to avoid putting personal info on company property?
I expect that I can be relocated to another office with a month of advance notice. Also cleanup, fire security check and fixing water leakage while I'm not there.
I don't expect that someone else will provide the keys of "my" office to the biology department when they have to keep a few sheeps during the weekend.
Your employer has gone beyond testing in prod to vibecoding live in prod, secrets included. Yes that's completely insane. Perhaps this exact mentality is how the primary system wound up broken in the first place?
Said alternate system is a bunch of Python scripts, an sqlite database, and a file containing various API keys to read and write to other company systems; it runs on a dedicated virtual machine.
I share all the code I produce to the other team. But yesterday I found out that the IT department gave the other team full access to my production machine, without my knowledge or consent (which was bad enough), and that the other team gave access to Claude, which has bean roaming free for a while now, on that production machine.
I've thrown a big fit over this; I don't know if I'm over reacting but I think it's insane.